5 Social Media Management Tools That Won’t Break Your Bank

Whether you’re the owner of a small business or the social media manager of a global corporation, we all watch our budget. Every penny must be accounted for and justified so you want social media management tools that are worth your cash.

If you manage social media for your business, you want tools that not only perform but make a tangible difference to your overall ROI (return on investment). I’ve tested hundreds of social media management tools and will let you know my top five. As it so happens, they are all under $50! Perfect for almost any budget.

Paper.li is a social media service that “organizes links and curates content shared on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, G+, YouTube and RSS into an easy to read newspaper-style format. With 8 supported languages, over 250 million social media posts each day and over 25 million articles analysed daily, Paper.li is huge and there’s a good reason why it is. Once you have completed the easy set up, Paper.li will automatically curate your digital newspaper including stories from your top interactors on Twitter. Then it will send daily or weekly tweets tagging those users to let them know that their content has been included in your paper. This amplifies your social media reach, encourages interaction, and rewards your top followers without you having to do any work!

Paper.li has a free user version which is great for starters but the paid version Paper.li Pro only costs $9 per month. The paid version allows you to customize your headers and layout, add banners to your ad space, add hyperlinked images, video or HTML code and include a personalized company bio. The paper can also garner subscribers which makes it great for creating a captive content audience. At just $9 per month, this is certainly one of my must have social media management tools.

Images rock the social media world and in fact researchers found that colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%.

So what do you do if you’re a small business and can’t yet afford a graphic designer?

Enter Canva, the revolutionary graphic design program which allows you to create social memes, banners, cards, invitations, ads and social media covers. The easy to use program provides a vast array of templates to fit your social media networks with drag and drop images, fonts, filters and effects. Using Canva you can create visuals for your social media networks in minutes to tweet or share alongside your message. The best thing about Canva is that it’s completely free and includes a vast library of complimentary images. If you want to use a paid image, simply pay $1 via PayPal or credit card and it’s instantly yours. No commitment, no signup and no hidden fees… just awesome!

SlideShare from Linkedin has 70 million users and 159 million monthly page views making it a weighty opponent in the social media management category. You know that lengthy company presentation you worked on for hours that only got seen by a few employees? Well now the world can see it online through a simple and easy upload to SlideShare.

Presentations can be added to your Linkedin profile and then shared to any of your social networks creating virality and encouraging followers. With the option to add to a niche category such as “education” or “technology” with relevant hashtags, SlideShare users can easily find, enjoy and share the topics that interest them. SlideShare is completely free to use and allows you to include a corporate logo, bio and backlink. You can check out my SlideShare “10 Twitter Power Hacks” right here.

One of my favorite social media resources is Friends+Me which is an automated social sharing tool. Friends+Me allows you to share your G+ posts across to Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and Tumblr so you can benefit from added post exposure and cut down on the time it would take you to access each network individually.

It also has a basic scheduling system which allows you to choose the time and day that your original post is shared. If you’re active on Google+, then you will know that the SEO (search engine optimization) benefits of posting to a Google connected platform are huge. When you use Friends+Me, the system includes a link back to the post on your Google+ profile or page meaning more followers and an increased social ranking. This tool is awesome for building up your G+ circles and connecting with meaningful influencers. Friends+Me has a chrome extension for added ease of use and it’s just $9 per month for 10 accounts.

AgoraPulse is the ultimate “must have” social media management tool for businesses of all sizes. Voted in the top 4 social media management tools of 2015 by G2Crowd, this tool allows you to schedule posts, monitor interactions on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, pull reports, and run contests and campaigns. I particularly love its report generation which grabs all your top stats and neatly pops them into a PowerPoint so you can run to your meeting armed with an impressive social presentation!

Its pricing starts at just $29 per month and from there you can easily hop to a higher package as your networks, page admins and business grows. AgoraPulse is easy to master even for social media newbies and definitely earns its place in my top 5 must have social media management tools under $50.

If you use all the tools I have mentioned here, you will only spend $47 per month and you will have a complete arsenal of social media tools guaranteed to boost your engagement, ROI and effectiveness.

Charli Day is a British writer and social media manager specializing in dynamic branding, campaign strategy and content engagement. Responsible for a number of high profile brands and with 500+ articles published, her success lies within her originality and hands on experience of the digital marketing world. Charli lives by the Mediterranean and loves Starbucks, popcorn flavoured jellybeans and writing poetry.

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